3 Major Trends Of Search Engine Marketing Of 2014

Search engine marketing has been one of the most diverse and sought after forms of online marketing. It is one of the largest verticals of digital marketing considering the amount of revenue generated. There have been continuous innovation and discoveries as far as the utilization of different tools is considered. There are tools and techniques that do wonders for some companies but not all of them are able to implement all the strategies to the perfection. Here we would look at certain trends in the domain of search engine marketing in the year 2014.

Creative Split Testing

Split testing is a process of executing your search engine marketing campaign with more than one landing page. It is one essential breakthrough achieved with the help of which you can easily make more than one ad copy targeting the same keyword. It gives a wider scope to target the potential customers. In split testing, two ad copies are run simultaneously so as to gauge the performance of both and know which ad copy is performing better.

The added advantage of split testing is that it is cost effective. Further, paid advertisements allow the advertisers to be on top of the search engines so the reach and effectiveness of any ad can be determined in a quick span of time. This is another value addition in case of search engine marketing over the organic search.

It is considered that split testing shall continue at least a week and ideally a month so as to make out inferences based on a large data. As far as the number of clicks is considered, split testing shall continue till 300 clicks minimum and ideally up to 1000 clicks.

Get a better hold of split testing by the following example:

Suppose you are running a PPC campaign for your company. The landing page designed for the same has 5 fields to be filled in by the visitor. Now if you feel there should be only 4 entries and you find the 5th irrelevant, creative split testing gives you the space of running the ad with two different landing pages. It then helps us to check which landing page is bringing more leads, conversions or sales depending on what the objective of your PPC campaign is.

Estimated Total Conversions

In 2013, Google announced their new innovation in the field of online marketing called Estimated Total Conversions. It is basically a tool to measure conversion across different devices. The tool effectively managed to gauge the cross device conversions then but an year after Google came with a new update that allowed users to track cross device conversions, physical store visits as well as queries on phone calls.

It works in sync with the huge database that Google has. That is the reason it is highly reliable if not 100% accurate. The evolution of this tool by Google was because the marketers felt a gap in the way the user navigated across various devices to ultimately get converted into a customer. So, it helps the advertisers by giving an estimate of what total conversions will be from different devices. Getting better information on the above factor leads to better optimization of search ads and hence drives higher ROI from the campaign. It further assists in making strategies and deciding on how much to spend for a particular ad campaign.

Let us look at an example to dig deeper into what cross device conversion is. Suppose you see an ad on your mobile phone “Blue Denims at flat 1999” on a particular website say www.xyz.com. You click on the ad, see the details but you do not make a purchase. Next day when you sit in front of a desktop, you directly open the website www.xyz.com and make the purchase of the same blue denim for which the ad was displayed on your mobile phone. This is a basic situation representing cross device conversion.

There have been several industries in the recent years making optimum use of estimated total conversions like Retail, E-commerce, Entertainment. Travel & Tourism etc.

Mobile Optimization

Mobile optimization is basically optimizing your website or your landing pages according to the size of the mobile devices. Approximately 46% of the people perform searches on mobile phones as of May,2013. It will not take much time for mobile devices to get on top of desktops as far as making online searches is concerned. More and more number of people are shifting to mobile devices as they are more convenient to carry as compared to desktops.

Over the years, it has been noticed that companies are trying more and more to target the mobile users by making responsive websites and landing pages. Responsive web design in simpler terms means that the website adjusts its content according to the size of device of the user so that the user doesn’t need to zoom in/out. It makes the overall navigation across the website easier and adds to a better user experience as well as leads to a better conversion rate. There are a lot of advantages of a responsive design of your website and landing pages such as:

Better navigation

Faster download speed

Better SEO performance

Better user experience

Competitive edge

High user engagement

Higher conversion rate

Better accessibility

There are certain challenges when you make your ad campaigns specifically targeting the mobile users. Since mobile devices are generally smaller in size, the ads need to be very crisp and engaging so that it attracts the user. You can not utilize a lot of space on a mobile device as it looks cluttered and unorganized.

All these have been the trends that have been on a rise in recent times. Since it is a very dynamic platform, companies generally adopt the rising trends in the market very quickly so as to gain the competitive advantage. If you have yet not implemented all these strategies, you surely need to rethink on your strategies before your competitors run you out of the game.

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SEM is a very evolving field and with each day it is getting better and better. Marketers use SEM as their major tool as people have started using mobiles and other devices to access internet. All the information is available at a clicks away. So everything should be planned and customised accordingly.